Settled Science still requires millions of dollars to keep the lie going.

From NPR, NASA is set to launch a new satellite that will monitor CO2 emissions from Space:

“NASA is preparing to launch a satellite capable of monitoring carbon dioxide emissions from space. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) will be the first spacecraft dedicated to seeing the greenhouse gas from orbit, and could pave the way for new technology to enforce future global warming treaties.”

“But first OCO-2 needs to make it off the ground. An earlier version of the satellite (known simply as OCO) crashed into the ocean near Antarctica shortly after launch.”

The irony of this should not be lost on anyone who is paying attention. The similarity between the absolute failure of the first launch of OCO to the failure of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult to convince people to believe their lies is priceless.

The AGW cult thought their pet project was dead after the crash in 2009 but they forget they had an AGW cult member in the White House and Obama quickly authorized another $468 million to try this again.

To make this story even more frustrating, the OCO-2 satellite won’t give definitive measurements of CO2 concentrations and it appears the only goal of this project is to generate justification for more sophisticated (i.e. more expensive) satellites in the future.

“OCO-2 is only an experiment. The picture it makes will be very fuzzy, and it won’t be able to look at every city on the planet. The air sampling method currently used will likely remain the gold standard for some time to come.”

The story totally falls apart when NPR reporter Goeff Brumfiel makes this statement (which is in the middle of the story on the NPR webpage but was the opening statement of the radio broadcast):

“Carbon dioxide coming from power plants and tailpipes is the main reason our planet is warming.”

Really? Well that theory is easily disproven by graphing two data sets – The Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration and Earth’s global temperature anomalies measured by the Remote Sensing System satellites.

It’s true that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been increasing.

But look what happens when we plot Earth’s global temperature anomalies versus CO2 concentration.

If Goeff Brumfiel’s statement was correct then the temperature anomalies would be rising as CO2 concentrations increased. But that didn’t happen and in fact the temperature anomalies have been flat during this period when CO2 concentrations have most certainly increased. To most people who understand math and statistics, that means CO2 has no direct correlation with global temperatures.

But hey, what’s another $468 million when we’ve got a meme to keep going?